Cartografia e Universalização da Terra: representações do espaço terrestre entre a Geografia de Ptolomeu e a Cartografia Náutica Ibérica do Renascimento

Abstract

The Modern cartography, which originated after the Great Navigations and the Renaissance period (XV-XVI), uses a type of continuous resource to the universal to represent the geographical reality in its topographical features, based on máthêsis (Foucault, 2016), in the geometrization of space and the suppression of geographical multiplicity through the process of decals and subjectivation (Deleuze, Guattari, 1995). In this bibliographic and theoretical study, we study the origins of modern Western cartography and the modern representation of space, relating them to the phenomenon of the universalization of terrestrial spatial data and terrestrial cartographic representation, in a path that scrutinizes its principles and methods on different fronts: the technical, theoretical and literary influence of the Geography by Claudius Ptolemy (c.100 - c. 170 AD), that was recovered at the Renaissance in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the advancement of projective theories about space and its process of geometrization at the Renaissance, the evolution of terrestrial and spatial representation techniques in nautical cartography, especially in Iberian nautical cartography, in the context of the Great Navigations, and, finally, the union of Renaissance cartographic techniques in the cartography of Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), in his famous projection known from his map of 1569. Through this ongoing study, we can see that there were three types of resources to the universal or universalization in modern cartography: we say that there was an ontological universalization of terrestrial spatial data thanks to the loss of their particular conditions, in the signic representation given by the processes mentioned at the beginning of this abstract. In the same way, the standardization of a way of mapping that treats the earth’s surface as an undifferentiated whole, constituting a single and universal horizon, evidenced a process of a qualitative universalization of the representation of the earth’s surface. In addition, such technical conditions had an education engaged with the transformations that Western society went through in the formation of capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages, in the face of the formation of a new Western epistémê. The technical superimposition of this form of mapping on other autochthonous forms of spatial representation constituted a form of technical universalization aligned with the interests of the West and linked to the globalization of the capitalist system and Western culture, composing, currently, the form of perception, organization, and planning of the territory that we experience, thanks to the current uniqueness of techniques and empirical universality, as expressed M. Santos (2001, 2002, 2007a, 2007b).